The IRIS Engine is a design for a new type of internal combustion engine. Its inventors say that engines constructed using this design can be smaller, lighter and significantly more efficient than traditional engines of comparable horsepower and displacement. The design replaces the piston and cylinder architecture of conventional engines with a purportedly novel mechanism called the Internally Radiating Impulse Structure, or IRIS. [1]
In January 2008, the IRIS Engine design won first prize for transportation technology in NASA's annual "Create the Future" design competition. [1] [2] In October 2008, the Radial Expansion Engine (RXE), a variant of the IRIS design, won second prize in the ConocoPhillips Energy Prize competition. [3]
In an IRIS combustion chamber, a number of inverted segments of a circle, or "chordons," interact to create a continuously sealed chamber of variable volume. Instead of elongating during combustion, as a traditional engine does, the IRIS engine's chamber expands in diameter. The inventors claim that this innovation will reduce waste heat and will increase the amount of surface area the engine has available to produce torque. [4]
IRIS engines are designed to run on traditional fuels, but could also be adapted to use biodiesel, natural gas, or hydrogen. IRIS chamber technology could also be utilized to create pumps, compressors and medical devices. [5]
The IRIS was conceived of by Timber Dick, a Denver, Colorado inventor and businessman. Three of his sons, Corban, Levi, and Tomicah Tillemann-Dick, also contributed to the design and are credited on patent applications relating to the IRIS engine. The design recently won the $20,000 Dow Sustainability Award. A closely related design by the same team of inventors, the Radial Expansion Engine, was awarded a $75,000 prize in the ConocoPhillips Energy Prize Competition. [6] [7]
An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy.
A pump is a device that moves fluids, or sometimes slurries, by mechanical action, typically converted from electrical energy into hydraulic energy.
A rocket is a vehicle that uses jet propulsion to accelerate without using the surrounding air. A rocket engine produces thrust by reaction to exhaust expelled at high speed. Rocket engines work entirely from propellant carried within the vehicle; therefore a rocket can fly in the vacuum of space. Rockets work more efficiently in a vacuum and incur a loss of thrust due to the opposing pressure of the atmosphere.
Spacecraft propulsion is any method used to accelerate spacecraft and artificial satellites. In-space propulsion exclusively deals with propulsion systems used in the vacuum of space and should not be confused with space launch or atmospheric entry.
A turbine is a rotary mechanical device that extracts energy from a fluid flow and converts it into useful work. The work produced can be used for generating electrical power when combined with a generator. A turbine is a turbomachine with at least one moving part called a rotor assembly, which is a shaft or drum with blades attached. Moving fluid acts on the blades so that they move and impart rotational energy to the rotor. Early turbine examples are windmills and waterwheels.
An ion thruster, ion drive, or ion engine is a form of electric propulsion used for spacecraft propulsion. It creates thrust by accelerating ions using electricity.
A magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster (MPDT) is a form of electrically powered spacecraft propulsion which uses the Lorentz force to generate thrust. It is sometimes referred to as Lorentz Force Accelerator (LFA) or MPD arcjet.
Specific impulse is a measure of how efficiently a reaction mass engine, such as a rocket using propellant or a jet engine using fuel, generates thrust. For engines like cold gas thrusters whose reaction mass is only the fuel they carry, specific impulse is exactly proportional to the effective exhaust gas velocity.
An aircraft engine, often referred to as an aero engine, is the power component of an aircraft propulsion system. Aircraft using power components are referred to as powered flight. Most aircraft engines are either piston engines or gas turbines, although a few have been rocket powered and in recent years many small UAVs have used electric motors.
A four-strokeengine is an internal combustion (IC) engine in which the piston completes four separate strokes while turning the crankshaft. A stroke refers to the full travel of the piston along the cylinder, in either direction. The four separate strokes are termed:
Thrust-specific fuel consumption (TSFC) is the fuel efficiency of an engine design with respect to thrust output. TSFC may also be thought of as fuel consumption (grams/second) per unit of thrust, hence thrust-specific. This figure is inversely proportional to specific impulse, which is the amount of thrust produced per unit fuel consumed.
A rocket engine uses stored rocket propellants as the reaction mass for forming a high-speed propulsive jet of fluid, usually high-temperature gas. Rocket engines are reaction engines, producing thrust by ejecting mass rearward, in accordance with Newton's third law. Most rocket engines use the combustion of reactive chemicals to supply the necessary energy, but non-combusting forms such as cold gas thrusters and nuclear thermal rockets also exist. Vehicles propelled by rocket engines are commonly used by ballistic missiles and rockets. Rocket vehicles carry their own oxidiser, unlike most combustion engines, so rocket engines can be used in a vacuum to propel spacecraft and ballistic missiles.
Fuel efficiency is a form of thermal efficiency, meaning the ratio of effort to result of a process that converts chemical potential energy contained in a carrier (fuel) into kinetic energy or work. Overall fuel efficiency may vary per device, which in turn may vary per application, and this spectrum of variance is often illustrated as a continuous energy profile. Non-transportation applications, such as industry, benefit from increased fuel efficiency, especially fossil fuel power plants or industries dealing with combustion, such as ammonia production during the Haber process.
The F-1, commonly known as Rocketdyne F-1, is a rocket engine developed by Rocketdyne. This engine uses a gas-generator cycle developed in the United States in the late 1950s and was used in the Saturn V rocket in the 1960s and early 1970s. Five F-1 engines were used in the S-IC first stage of each Saturn V, which served as the main launch vehicle of the Apollo program. The F-1 remains the most powerful single combustion chamber liquid-propellant rocket engine ever developed.
The gridded ion thruster is a common design for ion thrusters, a highly efficient low-thrust spacecraft propulsion method running on electrical power by using high-voltage grid electrodes to accelerate ions with electrostatic forces.
Turbomachinery, in mechanical engineering, describes machines that transfer energy between a rotor and a fluid, including both turbines and compressors. While a turbine transfers energy from a fluid to a rotor, a compressor transfers energy from a rotor to a fluid.
A rocket engine nozzle is a propelling nozzle used in a rocket engine to expand and accelerate combustion products to high supersonic velocities.
Rocket propellant is the reaction mass of a rocket. This reaction mass is ejected at the highest achievable velocity from a rocket engine to produce thrust. The energy required can either come from the propellants themselves, as with a chemical rocket, or from an external source, as with ion engines.
An internal combustion engine is a heat engine in which the combustion of a fuel occurs with an oxidizer in a combustion chamber that is an integral part of the working fluid flow circuit. In an internal combustion engine, the expansion of the high-temperature and high-pressure gases produced by combustion applies direct force to some component of the engine. The force is typically applied to pistons, turbine blades, a rotor, or a nozzle. This force moves the component over a distance, transforming chemical energy into kinetic energy which is used to propel, move or power whatever the engine is attached to.
Levi Mills Tillemann-Dick is an American businessman, academic, and author. Currently managing partner at Valence Strategic, LLC and a fellow at the New America Foundation, he is also the author of the 2015 book, The Great Race: The Global Quest For The Car Of The Future. Levi was also the lead author of the report Revolution Now, which he published while working in President Barack Obama's Department of Energy. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the Democratic primary in the 2018 election in Colorado's 6th congressional district.